Saturday, January 05, 2013

But not even Shakespeare's sonnets were all about how much his beloved is like a summer's day. The "dark lady" got some pretty hard bashings - you can't get much harsher than calling your former beloved "as black as hell, as dark as night."

And I will never believe that the "fair youth" and the "dark lady" of the sonnets did not exist, as some critics believe. Only people who don't write poetry could imagine you can just crank out sonnets purely for the sake of pretty phraseology or even money. To write a sonnet you have to feel it. Sure you have to work on it, but the origin of a sonnet is a feeling, a very personal feeling that you must bring to full expression. And sometimes even men from online dating sites can inspire one.